(noun) The tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues while avoiding complex decisions that require expertise.

The architecture review board spent forty minutes discussing button colors and five minutes approving the database migration strategy.

Bikeshedding describes the inverse relationship between a decision’s complexity and the amount of discussion it receives. The term derives from a hypothetical committee that debates extensively about a bicycle shed’s color while quickly approving a nuclear reactor’s construction. The phenomenon occurs because trivial matters allow broader participation, while complex issues require specialized knowledge that excludes most participants.

This represents the colloquial term for Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, the formal principle describing this organizational behavior.

This concept closely relates to Wadler’s Law, which applies the same principle specifically to programming language design discussions.

Examples:

• Corporate meetings that extensively debate office furniture while hastily approving budget allocations
• Open source projects with lengthy discussions about documentation formatting versus brief code reviews
• Planning committees that focus on signage aesthetics while deferring infrastructure decisions
• Engineering teams that debate variable naming conventions more than system architecture